Newbie

[racolavito]

Hello, I just want to introduce myself. I am a 58 year old disabled vet. I have Mandrake which i dual boot on a dell. I am trying to see if this OS will be right for me. It seams to be very stable but for the life of me I can not figure out how to install programs I get off of the net. I have went to the hot to sites and read about installing Tar.2BZ but when I try to follow the instructions nothing happens. It is driving me crazy. This is the same problem that caused me to quit trying Linux a few years ago. Like they say it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

[glennzo]

Hi racolavito. .tar.b2z files usually need to be extracted to a folder and then you need to build the program. Something like this:

tar xvfz program.tar.b2z
cd /folder extracted to
,/configure
make
make install

In my experience there will not be a menu entry for the program so you will need to find it and then run it with the command ./program.

So, if you downloaded a program called cardgame you would open a terminal and change to the folder holding that file. Let's say it saves to the desktop. In a terminal:
su -
enter password
cd Desktop
tar xfvz cardgame.tar.b2z
cd cardgame
./configure
make
make install
./cardgame
Your card game should run, provided there were no compile errors.

Note that I'm not all that confident that tar xfvz is the proper command to extract a .tar.b2z file so a little research on that will go a long way. It's a start though.

Edit. Since I thought that my advice was not all that accurate I got myself a .tar.bz2 file and extracted it. The command I used, as root, was
tar xfv wicd_1.4.2-src.tar.bz2
This successfully extracted the contents and created folders on the desktop.

[rokytnji]

Hi Raco,welcome to the forun.

[elija]

Hi racolavito and welcome to the forum.

I believe that Mandrake is quite an old distro, it is known as mandriva now. It may be worth downloading and installing the that instead as the hardware support will be much better among other fixes and enhancements.

One of the main differences between Windows and Linux is how software is normally installed. In Windows you find the software on the interweb, download and install it. In Linux, you can do this. More usually you would find and download the software you want from your chosen distributions repository using what is called a package manager.

I have no direct experience of Mandrake / Mandriva so I can't be more specific I'm afraid.

[Freston]

Hi and welcome!

Like they say it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

Those are your words, not mine

But indeed Mandrake is an older distro. You might improve your chances running something more up to date. You can try Mandriva if you feel you want something from that lineage. Most things you might want are easily accessible from the repo. I'm not exactly sure how that is called in Mandriva (it's bin a while) but it shouldn't be to hard to find somewhere in the menu.

For people content with mainstream applications in their stable releases just the repo's should do nicely. Not everyone is searching for the bleedin' edge developments and obscure applications that offer just that one functionality that's needed for some highly specialized task. Generally speaking what's in the repo's is enough to keep you going for a long time.